Vacation All I Ever Wanted

Hello from France, where I find myself on vacation. It’s lovely here. At 5pm it’s still 90 degree out. Not a solar eclipse in sight. I’m writing this on a porch while some very loud pigeons are looking for something in the vines in front of me. I’m drinking an iced coffee. But soon, wine.

Seeing as to my current predicament, I clearly won’t be sending a lot of these over the next couple of weeks. But there may be a few here and there both because I’m reading a ton, and because experimentation continues on this newsletter itself. As we approach the year anniversary of it (I started thinking about it, and writing it last summer vacation!), I continue to inch closer and closer to what I want to be doing with it.

Anyway, a few links for now. I’m also trying (and failing) to stay off Twitter, so I’m largely reading stuff I’ve already saved to read previously. I tend to get better at vacation as time goes on in said vacation…

Great, straightforward post by Gokul Rajaram with regard to something that may seem simple, but is undoubtedly often overlooked: the check metric on your “North Star Metric” (the most important metric for your company). Well worth the read.

Fascinating read on the little-known (of his own accord) editor-in-chief of Breitbart, Alexander Marlow. This was written before Steve Bannon was shoved out the door at the White House. I would quip that: “you won’t believe what happens next”, but I’m sure we all will…

Signing up a superstar “showrunner” like Ms. Rhimes—whose work for ABC has generated over $2 billion in revenue from advertising, rerun sales and international licensing, according to people familiar with the matter—underscores that Netflix intends to poach the best talent from traditional studios, whether in front of or behind the camera.

The $2 billion number is insane.

“We have continued to move up the food chain in terms of getting into the creation of content earlier,” Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos said in an interview.

I feel like a lot of companies might try to hide what they were doing so as not to (continue to) piss off their content partners. Not Netflix.

“I’m thrilled by the idea of a world where I’m not caught in the necessary grind of network television,” Ms. Rhimes said. In addition, since Netflix doesn’t have advertising, Ms. Rhimes doesn’t need to worry about language and nudity. Netflix, she said, provides “larger creative freedom.”

Let’s be clear: it’s the money first and foremost. But if the money is at least equal to what traditional Hollywood is paying, there are a lot of benefits that come with the new model when it comes to creativity.

Graeme McMillan talked to Rian Johnson about the pressures of directing a Star Wars film:

Johnson said that his longtime fandom for the franchise had ended up being the key that unlocked his ability to come up with The Last Jedi’s storyline. “The first thing I kind of realized was, I have to trust, kind of, my inner fan,” he explained. “If it resonates with me, I have to trust that. That’s what George [Lucas] did with the original movies, you know?”

Such high hopes. But this sentiment plus everything we’ve seen so far footage-wise gives me a lot of hope for Episode VIII. Episode IX, on the other hand…